On June 25, 2026, Vice President JD Vance announced that the United States will place Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in the same room as CENTCOM officers in Doha. According to Vance, the IRGC will “sit with” and “hang out with American commanders to ‘settle’ disputes over the Strait of Hormuz and Lebanon. This is not diplomacy. This is a suit of surrender, carrying the authority of the American vice presidency.

The IRGC is a terrorist organization that also functions as a state within a state. Through construction monopolies, smuggling networks, and sanctions evasion, these thugs control an economic empire that generates between $30 billion and $50 billion annually. The Quds Force—the clandestine branch of the IRGC responsible primarily for foreign operations and unconventional warfare—created and directs Hezbollah, the terrorist organization that murdered 241 American Marines in Beirut in 1983 and that has fired thousands of rockets at northern Israel since October 2023.

In 2019, Washington designated the IRGC as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) for compelling reasons. Opening a formal military channel with these butchers reverses that designation in practice. Such a move grants legitimacy to the force most responsible for American deaths in the region and for the broader architecture of instability stretching from the Levant to the Persian Gulf.

While Vance sells this arrangement as pragmatic progress toward keeping the Strait of Hormuz open and managing a ceasefire in Lebanon, Iran retains the ballistic missiles, naval mines, and swarms of speedboats needed to close that chokepoint whenever its strategic calculations demand it. The proposed mechanism gives the IRGC a permanent seat at the table while preserving its ability to weaponize energy flows against the global economy. America is not neutralizing a threat; it is........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)